Embroidered Collage

A few months ago this site was called "Mixed Media Art by Beth Robinson" and now it's called "Embroidered Collage."  When I made the change some weeks ago it was an acknowledgement of a narrowing of focus that had already occurred and a bit of a commitment to stay within that focus.  But it's only a medium.  And changing the name made me think even more about what I was creating within that medium.

I had started trying to do work in quarters and other grid like modular bits, even though very little of my attempts showed up here, but it just wasn't inspiring to me.  I felt hemmed in and that my work looked too cookie cutter.  So I went back over my completed works, trying to figure out what made me feel good. My favorite piece is still my 12x12 Kambaba Jasper, all those green and black swirls.  And I keep looking at Firestone and Water Dropped in my 6x6s, which have some of the same characteristics.

They use multiple semi-parallel lines in shapes and configurations that somehow represent flowing movement.  I've been calling them strata - after the layers of rock - as I mentioned in the collage entry a few days ago.  I've seen that term in a couple design books to refer to horizontal compositions made of layers, although I want to stretch the idea further than that.  This is the aesthetic that I am going to use as a default value, working into most of my art and using as a starting point when nothing comes to mind.

But that still told me nothing about subject matter.  Did I just want to make non-objective abstracts and layer patterns in different sizes?  It would probably satisfy me, but it would be much easier to market my art if I had at least a couple nameable concepts to promote.  Themes would also give me a place to exercise my compositional skills.  Some ideas that I'd thought about using in the past had been leaves, faces, animals, landscapes, portals, and water/fire/earth/air. 

I'm trying to start out with a little fewer than that, but I imagine that my mind will expand sneakily into the entire list, with some non-objective abstracts thrown in for good measure!  Tomorrow's landscape is the first piece I've completed after thinking about these things and I have a leaf and a cat piece in progress as well.  I feel like I'm starting with some of the low-hanging fruit in terms of ideas for the actual execution of the theme, but that's okay, because that's how I'll develop to be able to make more imaginative and unique works.